Astrid Hawk

A thriller that I actually found thrilling... what a revelation. This book kept me feeling slightly uncomfortable most of the way through, particularly following Claire's story, since her story dealt with domestic abuse and domestic violence. But mostly I was just constantly worried for her, worried that she was going to make an obvious mistake, and I appreciated that about the writing. I was genuinely hooked, maybe in spite of myself, maybe because I was hoping to watch an abuser get taken down. The situation was a bit improbable, and the purchasing of hotel rooms and plane tickets with cash seemed especially conveniently easy... but overall it was still a good tense read.

The one thing that really bothered me was the use of a Google doc for spying... the author apparently forgot that little icons show up at the top of the screen so that everyone can see who is in the doc... and if the same person is in there from two locations - two browser tabs, two different browser windows, two different machines - they'll show up twice in that list of icons. So spying using another user's credentials wouldn't have been possible without detection. Fortunately, this flawed Google doc spying mechanism mostly serves to add suspense and doesn't end up being pivotal to the plot.

I'm giving this 4.5*, because I think it's not quite a 5* - not quite one of my all-time favorites - but certainly stands above what I've recently marked 4*. I loved the relationship between our two main characters, and I definitely enjoyed the ingenuity in the premise of this - how Weir came up with a somewhat scientifically-plausible situation that put Ryland out in space far from Earth, and then kept building on the science he made up to create plausible problems and puzzles on top of that. And of course it's fun watching Ryland figure out how to work out these puzzles and solve all these problems using just the materials and knowledge he has on hand.

The first half of the book read like conversations I used to have with my best friend in high school. One of us would come up with a question - "what would happen if X came in contact with Y?" or "what would you do if you were stuck in XYZ situation?"- and then he'd ask me additional questions to goad me on while I tried to reason out a logical answer just based on principles of physics (and later, principles from our college engineering classes). We typically didn't ever get to the point of actually pulling out a calculator or pencil and paper, but sometimes we did just to get a feel for order of magnitude of things. I loved the early parts where Ryland is trying to figure out where he is and what he's doing, and is reasoning it out based on the little information he has on hand plus his knowledge of math and physics.

For those who complain that there is a bit too much math... there is actually 0 on-page math. I actually found myself wanting more of it. I took astrodynamics in college (I have an aerospace engineering degree with a space focus... astro, as we called it then, is kind of essential :) ), and I wanted to see the orbits, insertion paths, and escape velocities sketched out and calculated. I wanted to actually see the math that resulted in the constant tallying of grams of fuel being used. If Weir has a calculation notebook lying around somewhere that he used, I'd totally read that version of the story.

Weir does take a few significant scientific shortcuts in this book - which of course happens all the time in science fiction, but I'm not used to seeing from Weir. The one that stands out, and which I can discuss without spoilers, is that he relies heavily on a fictional material that his main character has named xenonite, which is apparently a substance made from xenon in solid form that has practically mythical qualities. Xenonite can't be cut or dented by any of our earth-built tools; it can be shaped into just about anything; it can be used to create almost any kind of surface including transparent surfaces; it can withstand a huge range of temperatures and pressures and pretty much the entire periodic table of elements; it can bond to any earth-rendered metal or composite material. And our characters go through xenonite like it's an infinitely renewable resource, without much consideration for how much of it was actually brought on board to begin with. It's a bit of an odd juxtaposition against the rest of the materials mentioned in the book, which are typically assigned quantities or volumes or some kind of limit. Xenonite feels limitless, both in what it can do and its availability.

I think perhaps my favorite element of the book was the first contact element - how Ryland goes about discovering properties of extraterrestrial life and figuring out how it works and how to communicate. Are the various life forms realistic? No idea. Probably not really. Maybe the unicellular ones are plausible. The multicellular ones are likely more imaginative. Either way, it's fun reading about how Ryland encounters them and tries to figure out what he's dealing with.

And of course Rocky. On his own, Rocky is probably not a compelling character, just as Ryland really isn't (in fact, the flashbacks to Ryland's life on earth, and especially his interactions with Stratt and other scientists got a bit dull for me). But Rocky and Ryland together are great to "watch", as they learn to work together and develop a real friendship.

I don't know if I'll ever re-read this, but it was definitely a great ride and deserves the hype.

Still a great series, with likeable, relatable characters and many more imaginative uses of magic to discover (the trick streets are an especially fun mechanic in this book), but I didn't think this second entry was as strong as the first book.

In Wundersmeden/Wundersmith, we follow Morrigan and her cohort of 8 other young students with magical abilities in Unit 919 through their first year of education where they're trained in the use of their magical skills and taught relationship skills, like collaboration and loyalty. Morrigan, however, is still treated as a bit of a pariah - her magical ability was revealed only to her immediate cohort and her teachers and kept a secret from the rest of the school/community, and most of those who know the secret resent having to keep it and are afraid of what it means. While the previous book ended on a warm note with feelings of strong acceptance, found family, and Morrigan feeling like she could finally stop worrying about not being enough, this book feels a bit like a step backward, where Morrigan is once again fighting to be accepted and to find her place in this new company of magic wielders who are supposed to be loyal for life.

What frustrated me is that Jupiter, who is Morrigan's father figure, is mostly absent from this book, leaving Morrigan to struggle with serious moral dilemmas, bullying, and life-threatening situations on her own. He was often protectively dismissive of her worries in the first book, but in this one he plays the role of the absent father who values work over family. Although Jupiter recognizes that his prioritization was poor at the end of the book, it felt unsatisfying to me - perhaps if I was reading this as the target audience age instead of as an adult, it wouldn't have bothered me.

I did enjoy seeing a lot more of Cadence and Jack in this book, and I hope we get more of them in the next one as well. I have all 4 books in Danish, and although you'd think my reading level would be improving beyond them by this point, I'm reading them so inconsistently that I still don't feel the translation is too remedial for me. So... on to book 3 it is.

A satisfying conclusion to Ewilan's trilogy, and it set us up to learn a lot more about Salim's talents and adventures in the next trilogy. Camille/Ewilan matured a lot in this book - where she was more capricious and reactive in the first two books, she becomes significantly more reflective in this one and is often the voice of reason. It's perhaps a natural progression given all the deep responsibility and dark truths she's had to face, but the change is marked.

Salim, in contrast, doesn't mature as much, but he's thrown (as is the rest of the company) when his hidden abilities suddenly come forward in stressful situations. This book starts to take him away from his role as encouraging, upbeat sidekick and more towards his role as protagonist in the next trilogy. He does become significantly less flippant, however, and tends to be more morose and sensitive, constantly feeling overlooked and rejected, which became a bit irritating at times (especially given how Book 2 ends).

Since this is a middle grade / very young adult story, there are some heartstopping moments, but in the end it's all found/reunited family and happily-ever-after.

Read this for a Kindle challenge, and while it was certainly more enjoyable than reading one of the thousands of formulaic cringey romances on KU, it was... underwhelming. The synopsis makes it sound like the magical element in the baked goods is going to somehow play a critical role, but it is disappointingly not at all mysterious nor particularly pivotal in the book.

The plot was... fine. It's supposed to be a cozy, feel-good read, so it didn't surprise me that the stakes were never terribly high, even when there was conflict (and of course the 3rd act breakup, even though this wasn't a pure romance).

My biggest complaint with this book was the constant peppering of French words and phrases mixed into the English whenever bilingual French characters were speaking. It irritated me, since it was all French vocabulary that one learns in beginner French class, and a bilingual speaker would not bother substituting individual remedial words in their native language and then go on to use much more complicated sentence structures and vocabulary in their second language. For example, a French speaker at one point says "She wore une robe, a very beautiful dress...". Why in the world would she bother substituting "une robe" for "a dress" only to actually use the word "dress" in the very next part of the sentence? I realize this sounds nitpicky, but the novel is littered with examples like this that just grated on me. I have French friends... this isn't how they speak English.

Like the rest of this series, there were parts where this really dragged, with hours of descriptions of the characters wrestling with their emotions, and parts where there was intense action. This one had aerial dragon action at least, which was fun. The epilogue was a full 2 hours of narration... which is nuts, but I guess makes sense given the length of the total series. My biggest complaint is that one of the reveals really didn't make a lot of sense - it went directly against the very first scene in the series, and some of the events in book 3. Overall I guess it was a satisfying ending the series, with no obvious loose ends left - but I also didn't come away feeling like I was going to miss any of the characters.

Another disappointment - this is what I get for just picking up a book based on its cover. I think this one suffered from being in translation. There was a lot of telling rather than showing - a lot of sentences constructed from pronoun/name + filter verb (I just recently learned this is what I dislike in writing that makes it feel less professional and more childish to me). The perspective shifted a lot, often mid-paragraph. And the characters just all seemed a bit... off. Unrealistic. Exaggerated in places, and overly simplified in others. I don't know how much of this was Japanese culture and literature that got lost in translation, and how much of this was a man writing women and failing at it.

I'm really glad I listened to this so I could hear Geena tell her own story in her own voice. I've read a handful of trans people's stories now, and they're all very very different - not just because the authors have different backgrounds and were raised in different cultures, but also because issues that we tend to think are common across trans experiences are really not. I enjoyed Geena's story-telling style, and although I've never had any interest in beauty pageants (queer or not) and the modeling world, she does a great job at showing how what is often perceived as a superficial world/career path was so critical in shaping her sense of identity, reclaiming her trans joy, and influencing how she appears in the world.

This was vastly disappointing for me. I've heard great things about Backman's work, and I enjoyed his short story "The Answer is No" - I found it ironically humorous and thought he did a great job plainly and succinctly capturing the human condition in that story. I was looking forward to reading more, and thought this book had the makings of a mature, poignant story about friendship, love, and survival. I was dead wrong.

In this book we follow Louisa, a freshly-turned-18-year-old girl who has grown up in group foster homes and recently lost her best friend who helped her get through said foster homes. She has a chance encounter with an artist she has idolized for years through one of his early works, and when he dies that night, he bequeaths his painting to her. She attaches herself to the painting's guardian Ted, one of the artist's childhood friends, because she is newly emancipated and homeless, and has no idea what to do with a valuable work of art. For much of the rest of the book, Ted and Louisa travel by inexplicably long train journey to Ted's hometown, and Ted tells Louisa about his friends from one pivotal summer in their childhood, the summer that the artist created the painting she now "owns".

I was disappointed with this book from the start when I realized that we were following a teenager who is frankly idiotic at all turns, and behaves more like a 13-14 year old than an 18 year old. In fact, you can't tell the difference, really, between Louisa at 18 and all the kids in Ted's memories, who are all 14 going on 15. Louisa is really really really annoying - intentionally so, because she's supposed to be a foil to Ted, who is oh so old (he's 39) and really really really boring because he's afraid of absolutely everything. Although the book tries to show that she has all these simple and true insights about life and adulthood thanks to her actually still being a child (and having had a troubled childhood where she had to just figure things out by observation instead of having adults to model for her), the whole thing is written in a choppy, told-you-so tone that is highly grating. Again, more like a 13-year-old social media tone.

My bigger issue with the book was that it was highly repetitive and centered on trauma, as if the worse these kids' lives were, the more real and meaningful their stories could be. For some reason, Ted/the author tells the story with lots of dramatic foreshadowing and deliberate hiding of information, so that you're expecting to be building up to a huge, dramatic, painful ending with the deaths of everybody involved (except Ted of course) - so when we finally get to the hometown to hear the end of the story, it's a bit of a letdown. Why was he so cagey about the whole thing? Why was this such a pivotal summer in his memories? It just didn't make sense, which left me with the feeling that the author really just wanted to imagine various modes of childhood trauma and throw them all together with a bunch of one-liners that sound insightful.

Each one of the kids involved has a hard, traumatic backstory and comes from a broken family (or no family at all, in Louisa's case). Of course we've already talked about Louisa, orphaned at age 5 and shuffled around in the foster care system through apparently abusive or at best neglectful homes. Ted, the narrator, is a gay man who, as mentioned, is afraid of everything. His father died of cancer when he was a teen, leaving him with just an older brother who beat him up instead of defending him, and a mother who was often absent since she had to work to take care of everyone. Joar lives with a loving mother who lacks basic knowledge and common sense, and an alcoholic father who regularly beats his wife and son (and spends all his money on alcohol), so that Joar doesn't really know how to approach the world except through violence. Ali (not her real name) lives with her father, who drinks and parties through life, borrowing money he can't pay back and exposing her to sexual assault through the friends he brings home. And the artist, who doesn't get a name until the last 100 pages of the book (and again, it's not clear why it was a secret... there is really no reason given for not revealing his name until the end, and why oh why would his best friend not talk about him by his name in the first 350 pages while he's telling the story??), is autistic or in some other way just "different" from all the other kids in a way that neither of his parents accept; his father essentially rejects him, and his mother self-medicates with alcohol and pills, leading the artist to be deeply depressed and hooked on pain meds himself.

The kids all have each other, but they are fully defined, as characters, by their trauma. Their friendship mostly consists of being loud and rude, being violent with each other, farting and laughing about it, mocking each other, and occasionally getting into "shenanigans" like stealing bicycles, breaking into various places, driving without a license, or riding shopping carts down hills - but hey, they have really good reasons and noble intentions for doing all those things, and they have tragic backstories, so they're still good, lovable kids, and if we can't see that it's because we're too adult to have their perspective, right?

I kept reading because I kept hoping that all the overdone metaphors, all the saccharine insights, all the blunt, ballsy, and not-as-ironic-as-they-wanted-to-be one-liners would coalesce into something that transcended the presentation... but it really never did. What a disappointment.

A fun game of cat-and-mouse, but Maul just doesn't make a very compelling villain/anti-hero. Sort of similar to Voldemort, he has no depth and we're just supposed to accept that he's evil and his only flaw is hubris. He's a loner, with no meaningful interaction with others beyond taunting them and/or killing them (aside from interactions with Sidious, of course, but those are brief and just master/subordinate interactions), and he spends all his time in his own head thinking about how much he hates the Jedi and how much he resents his mission and his quarry, with no real examination of his motivations and drive. I found his sections boring, and much preferred the parts with our doomed protagonists.

Read for the Around the World challenge: Albania. I know that everyone recommends Ismail Kadare for Albanian writing... but none of his books sounded appealing to me, and after reading about him, I learned that he either shares political views with the dictatorial communist State in Albania, OR he compromised his personal principles to align with the reigning party. I came across this book, and knew immediately it was more what I was interested in (principled resistance to misinformation and lies and human rights abuses). It took me a long time to find a copy in the US (actually, I didn't find a copy in the US - my used copy came from the UK), which only confirmed my suspicion that I was on the right track with my selection.

I was expecting this book to be a description of life inside an Albanian gulag, sort of in the same vein as some of the North Korean gulag books out there - but the point of this book is not at all to reveal gulag conditions. Although the first 3rd or so does describe living and working in the Albanian mining work camp Spaç in the 1970s, and the author describes quite a bit of his subsequent solitary confinement in the Tirana prison while awaiting trial, the point of the book is not the gulag. The point of the book is to pay tribute to 2 brave men, friends of the author who were political prisoners along with him, who fought back against the political direction of the country until the end.

In February 1978, author Fatos Lubonja was serving a 7 year sentence in the "re-education" facility of Spaç, a work camp where prisoners were required to perform grueling work in the mines and be subjected to other punishments like deprivation, when he is arrested and taken to the Tirana prison (where prisoners are held for trial). He is held there for 5 months in solitary confinement with no visitors, insufficient food, no bed, and no windows while he is interrogated in preparation for trial and is subsequently tried, alongside 10 other men, for supposedly "organizing" an anti-Hoxha and anti-Albanian political propaganda and agitation group. Most of the book is a detailed account of the trial in which all of the men were falsely accused, showing how the State used fear and intimidation tactics with blatently false (coerced) testimony from other prisoners to try to break the accused and sentence them for their supposed "crimes".

Lubonja's book is surprisingly detached, particularly in the descriptions of the horrid camp and prison conditions. He does not leave room for a lot of emotions in his descriptions of the interrogation and the trial. It is easy to imagine how the State broke many a prisoner with threats and fear, obstinately refusing to see truth and continuing to push lies, immovable by either human connection or reason. The two men accused of "leading" the alleged organizations were particularly stalwart, refusing to be cowed by the State, calmly defending their positions to the end. It is heartbreaking and infuriating to read.

Lubonja does not spend much time educating the reader on the political situation in Albania at the time, nor Albania's history and international relations. I found it helpful to do a bit of pre-reading on their alliances and political development through the first half of the 20th century, and I was glad that I happened to have read Motherland by Julia Ioffe just prior to reading this, as it covers helpful context on Lenin, Stalin, and Krushchev that are highly relevant in Albania's political perspectives in the 1970s. Lubonja's writing (and the translation) are eloquent and advanced. This is not an ordinary convict's memoir. This is a reflection on survival, standing up for one's principals, and never surrendering to the lies of dictators.

Hundreds (thousands?) of tomes, papers, and annotations have been written about this work, many by far more learned scholars, better experts in literature and language, than I - so this is less a review and more a summary of my experience.

I'm not sure why I was never introduced to this book in the course of my schooling - but whatever the reason, I missed it (and many other commonly read classics as well), and felt I should rectify the situation. I went into this story with few preconceptions - I knew the broad strokes of the plot, and I knew some character names that have been enshrined in literary cultural memory. If anything, I was negatively predisposed to the book, since most people I know talk about it with a groan, implying that it's a slog and full of direness and dread.

I was pleasantly surprised that the first 100-150 pages were anything but a slog. Ishmael (our narrator) is certainly wordy, but every scene was hilarious, filled with puns, witty dialog, and absurdist humor. The theatrical and hyperbolic tone continued through the novel, preventing the mood from ever becoming particularly dark despite scenes of illness, death, moral dilemmas, and racism (and there is certainly a lot of racism - it may be that Ishmael is the original "but I'm not racist" racist? Or one of the first?).

Things started to drag for me after the first whale hunt, or maybe just before, when the author/narrator gives long lectures on whale taxonomy, whaling procedures, whale anatomy, and sometimes musings on human nature and culture. All is told very unscientifically and pompously, making frequent references to religion and myth, particularly Christian and Greek myths, and often strings together several metaphors into one long rambling chain such that it becomes difficult to picture what the author is trying to say. Combine that with the nearly Shakespearean writing style, and the antiquated and arcane use of English vocabulary - I imagine this book would be nearly impenetrable for a non-native English speaker, or even native English speakers who haven't had a literary or linguistic education.

The tedious bits were punctuated by small plot vignettes - the Pequod meets various other whaling ships, providing an opportunity for the narrator to relay to us the tall tale(s) provided by the other crews, and there are various events on board that allow the introduction of various characters and the development of Ahab's and the mates' characters. All the vignettes and plot points are highly absurdist. Some are laugh-out-loud, and some are more head-scratchers - told in a metaphorical style that makes the reader wonder if what is being spelled out on the page is actually happening in the story, or if it is just the narrator's imagination.

It made me wonder whether this book would even make any sense were it to be rewritten in a modern style with straightforward language and tone, but keeping the deadpan presentation of events. I suspect it would be a sort of Catch-22 but set on a whaling ship.

Read for First Reads April 2026. 4* for enjoyment; 3* for story construction. I'd liken this to Blake Crouch without the infuriating main characters - it takes our real American society and technology, and extrapolates it a bit unrealistically in a sort of thriller tale. I haven't really enjoyed Crouch's writing because his main characters (and plots) are driven by bad decisions born of hubris. In this book, the main characters were far less annoying.

Tardiff imagines a near-future society where everything is managed by an algorithm... or in this case many algorithms from interconnecting networks. He explores how this impacts real people's lives, and how easy it is for the creators to lose control of their creations, and how difficult it is to actually secure these systems. There is a lot of social engineering/hacking, starting with a basic phishing exercise and ramping up from there - most of it is conveniently smooth and movie-ish (despite the main character constantly scoffing at false hackers who think hacking is like the movies), but it was still fun to read. There is a little bit of basic tech-splaining in the book - I'm in tech, and it didn't really bother me. It was simplified, but not outright wrong (at least, not in the context of fiction). I don't know if it would bother others not in tech, or if it would just be annoying. Other reviewers seemed to find it insulting, but I don't think it was intended that way... I read it as a way to ground the future tech in today's practices, which made it feel more realistic... you could see a possible path from where we are to the imagined world of the book.

It's a fast-moving romp that does get a little out of control by the end, and it loses touch a bit with what's feasible - but I still enjoyed this read a lot.

Read for April 2026 First Reads. This book was a mess from start to finish. The writing is comically childish, there is no sense of individual character voice (even though it's ostensibly told from 3 character POVs, they all mostly sound the same, and each character's chapters include thoughts from other characters so it starts to get confusing who we're supposed to be following when), and the attention to detail is incredibly uneven, to put it mildly, with the insertion of seeming random small details that do nothing to enhance the atmosphere or sense of time and place, only to be very abruptly followed by an outline-level description of events.

The story itself jumps incoherently from event to event and place to place with only a loose sense of a central plot tying them together. The book is incorrectly labelled a mystery/thriller - although there is a murder and the killer is unknown throughout the book, there is no sense of thrill, anticipation, or even puzzle-solving. The characters just go about their lives, thinking about how unfair their lot in life is for being stupidly rich and thus in the limelight. There is some incredibly clumsy blackmail that fails to feel sinister due to how comically exaggerated it is. When the killer is revealed, about 3/4 of the way through the book, it is done abruptly, with no preamble, and feels like an afterthought. There is no discussion about how the conclusion was drawn - no piecing together clues. While it's clear that the author is trying to build a mystery using several unreliable narrators, what actually happens is that she simply tells several completely different stories, never bothering to stitch the plot holes together to make it plausible that each narrator simply saw things differently. By the time the "mystery" is "solved", there have been other events that have superseded the importance of the original murder, furthering the feeling that the "reveal" is an afterthought.

I wasted my time reading this even though it was free. Don't waste yours.

I probably shouldn't have expected any better given how I felt about the first book, but somehow I was still disappointed. I wouldn't read this unless it's free (it's on KU for now at least) and you actually liked the first book.

The few things I liked about the first book were absent from this one - there was very little of the military academy trope (Arden does go to class in the first half of the book, but for the most part she gets special treatment due to her relationship with Cyrus, and nearly every class she attends has a random exception to just allow the regime to f*k with the students). There is no longer any real dystopian element with state secrets and lies to uncover - the only secrets that are revealed are related to the gods and the war origin myths (which... frankly are quite flimsy).

It was impossible to care about or even feel outrage for any of the secondary characters - Arden's classmates, Cyrus's fellow royals, even the key Soalians. Arden's mother gets mostly a cursory appearance in a single scene, and Arden very easily dismisses her from her mind in favor of constantly going back to her Cyrus addiction. It feels like there are no connections at all to Arden's former life in the "real" civilian world.

The story itself stays very superficial, focused mostly on the push/pull between Cyrus and Arden, and their relationship continues to feel cringey and icky. Arden seems to have lost all of her personal agency and is driven only by her desire to preserve her relationship with Cyrus. The book introduces way too many tropes along the way that really don't serve to do anything except confuse the plot. As a result, this book continues the habit of the first book in having the characters behave in completely nonsensical ways in order to poorly tie things together. (For example, Arden gains the ability to wander around in spirit form, invisible and unheard, in this book... yet when it comes time for the climax, she goes wandering in her corporeal body, where of course she is discovered where she's not supposed to be, creating the ability for a major physical conflict. This whole scene wouldn't have happened if she'd simply wandered around as a spirit to do what she needed to do.) I was also annoyed by Arden's frequent juvenile interjections into her narration - such as "Wow wow wow" when someone says something mildly surprising that the author wants us to read as shocking.

I read this because I thought it was the conclusion to a duology, and figured I'd just knock it out since I started it. Unfortunately, it looks like it's intended to be a trilogy - this book cut off just as the main conflict was getting set up, and the ending felt very rushed and sloppy. Somehow despite my low expectations, I was still disappointed.

A truly impactful story, full of wisdom, introspection, grief, and brutality juxtaposed with shining moments of generosity and real humanity.

For much of this book, the author is 10-12 years old, and though he seems to have been a very introspective 10-year-old, he lacked a lot of the broader context and world experience to truly understand everything that was happening around him. In that sense, the story reads a bit like Solito, in which the author was 9 years old. 10-year-old Qais is subjected to scenes of unspeakable brutality, some of which he sustains on his own body. It is hard to read those parts. But then those moments of terror and torture are counterbalanced by instances of true generosity and warmth - like the family who welcomed his into their home after they caught him stealing pomegranates from their garden, and like the Kuchi family that welcomed them into their tribe as blood relatives.

As an American reading this book, I was treated (sometimes in a very painful way) to a story of Afghani culture that I hadn't known, and is difficult to find elsewhere (even in semi-autobiographical stories like The Kite Runner). The ending was very bittersweet, as at the time, it was a period of hope for Afghanistan with the Taliban rule lifted and foreign influence seeming like it might help Afghanistan rebuild their infrastructure and restore their old ways of life - but of course we know what happened in the following decade.

Bottom line - it's a compelling, riveting story, and a fantastic cultural education. A must-read.

Written as a letter to his son, this is part memoir and part reflection on race - particularly the American implementation of the concept of race. It brings up great questions and makes clear the depth to which long ingrained racism changes black Americans' lives, psyches, outlooks... how it makes them live in fear, and how they feel detached from their own history (which, like everyone else's, is just a story and not reality). There isn't anything I can say about this book that hasn't already been said, so I'll leave it at that. The first half is particularly thought-provoking, more so than the second half, and yes, I do think it's worth a read - whether you are an American or not and whether you believe you are white or not.

I know my 2 star rating is an unpopular opinion, but as this book went on, I found it more and more unsettlingly problematic.

The first issue is that Perez seems to mistake effect for cause - she argues that bias against women is due to a gender data gap. The unstated assumption is that, if this data gap didn't exist, people would actually use the data and solve all problems. In fact, as her endless stream of examples points out, the world's problems that stem from a bias against women (or more accurately, a failure to consider women) are mostly NOT due to a lack of data, but due to the same thing that causes the lack of data - a mostly universal socialized tendency to assume that humanity == male.

Putting the annoyingly contradicting logic aside (because the examples still stand, even if Perez incorrectly identifies the root cause), the problematic aspect of this book is that it reads like a TERF echo-chamber. If you are a cis-woman, trans-exclusionary, and want to feel indignantly and righteously outraged about treatment of those who we label as women, this is definitely the book for you. However, this offers no solutions, no outlet for your anger, so you'll just... I don't know... be thumping your fist on the table going "yeah! someone else said it!" with zero meaningful change. I admit that it's very compelling and easy to get sucked in, but every time I put the book down for a bit between sessions, and reflected on what I'd read, I realized that it's mostly just appealing to its target audience emotionally, telling them what they want to hear, rather than providing truly revelatory information that is useful and actionable.

This book entirely ignores intersectionality, the fact that there are data gaps for non-"white" races even for men, the fact that non-"white" women face even greater blindness bias than most of the situations Perez discusses. (Yes, in some cases she mentions other races specifically - e.g. when discussing stoves available to African households - but in mixed-race or generic examples she makes the same mistake she's railing against - she assumes that all "women" are homogenous, and she's envisioning a white (usually British) woman in that image).

There was an opportunity here, which Perez misses, to discuss the tricky challenge of de-categorizing something that has previously been categorized. It's similar to the topic of racism's relationship to "colorblindness". To be "colorblind" is to keep all your learned prejudices while dismissing the very real differences in history and experience among different racial groups - which in today's culture, usually means just expecting everyone to be "white". Even though the concept of race is artificial, something we invented as a society to divide power and possessions among groups, it's still important to keep tracking it separately so that we can understand the impact of policies, design, technology, etc on ALL those groups, particularly those that have been overlooked and underserved or abused. It's the same with the gender data gap. Even though gender is something we invented as a society, we can't ignore the differences between the genders due to the roles and patterns we've created for them. Perez does argue for gender-disaggregated data, but she doesn't acknowledge the impact here on the broader topic of gender.

There is a brief statement in the beginning of the book that acknowledges that sex and gender are two different things and that gender is a social concept... but then for the rest of the book she constantly conflates the two. She speaks about bias against the female "gender" when she's talking about issues that are directly related to sex (reproductive health, for example), and she occasionally talks about the female sex when she's mentioning issues of gender (which would apply to anyone perceived as female or feminine - such as being "shushed" in a professional setting). She makes zero acknowledgement that it is the concept of gender roles, and particularly binary gender roles, that is the entire problem here.

For all my complaints, I do think the book was well-structured - and it's a good look at how hidden bias makes its way into policy, politics, and technology. But on the whole, I feel it promotes a very very limited view, which, if adopted, would perpetuate the very problem it highlights across other marginalized groups.

I had low expectations, but this was even worse than I expected. I'm not a huge romance reader, but I think every once in awhile it's fun to read one as sort of a guilty pleasure (not that there's anything wrong with being a romance reader, but there's rarely anything with greater meaning in these stories, so I know that picking one up is just for a diversion). Lately, my choices have mostly just shown me what romance readers do and don't like, rather than giving me that fun diversion. This one was a particularly low point, and I'm struggling to understand why genre readers like it enough for it to have higher than a 4 star average on GR.

For a "romantic comedy", there really wasn't much romantic or comedic. The romance was mostly lustful obsession, occasionally punctuated by the characters thinking about how "special" the other person was just to provide some token sense that they weren't just driven by lust (which they absolutely were). The comedy consisted of absurd and wildly uncomfortable scenes that were too awkward and contrived and full of grotesque imagery to be funny. I don't mind spice, but I found myself dreading and wanting to skim past the sex scenes in this book (and there were quite a lot) - they just felt like hindrances for getting on with the story, and they were often cringey. The final conflict in the last 50 pages should have been meaningful, but it was overdone, and because the author wanted a happy ending, the FMC ends up reverting to her vapid, lustful self from the beginning of the book and allows herself to be physically subdued into accepting a resolution to the conflict.

Sadly, would not recommend, even for a known quantity diversion. It's just cringey. Look elsewhere.

This really isn't the fairy tale retelling that many summaries and blurbs say it is. It's really an atmospheric story with some paranormal elements based on folklore. It draws from and combines several northern cultures' stories about Bigfoot, werebears, and other forest man/monster blends. It tries to ask and answer questions about being true to yourself, finding your own way in life, and whether love and our relationships with others can override our own natures. The forest imagery in here was delightful - the smells of the tundra, the tastes of the berries, the feel of cold water and stone. But I found the characters hard to relate to, and the ending was unsatisfying. The last paragraph in particular felt bolted-on.

Read as a February 2026 First Reads selection. Overall, a really fun, science fiction idea about future human space travel and colonization with a creepy, dark, almost horrific setting... but too many gimmicks and side themes made the read less enjoyable.

This one is a little all over the place, and I think would be improved by either being longer, or by removing a few of the more distracting themes. I'm a big fan of space exploration scifi and first contact scifi, so I was pretty excited to see something like this in the First Reads selection. I really liked the initial setup, too - despite the fact that the mission crew seemed pretty juvenile, which is not at all how such a mission would go even IF we (humans) had done it many times before, I enjoyed the setup of human culture, the pre-alien-worldbuilding that the author did. He leans heavily into social media culture and capitalistic trends, and he had a new (in my experience) take on it - from "idols" whose every sense is connected and streamed to followers real-time, to the evolution of drug culture, with everything from death-simulators (for the DMT release) to auditory drugs known as "auditives", that provide the user with what reads like a synesthetic trip of rhythm and melody.

Music, rhythm, and math factor heavily into this book, and in most cases it's well-done. All of our 4 crew members are of Caribbean nation descent (the author is Barbadan himself), and there are elements of that culture, the sounds and rhythm and rhyme of it, woven into the story - into Cleo herself and how she interprets the world, into her rover, even into alien communication and translation. It's a very cool element IMO, and fun to find all the little references... mostly.

But when our protagonist Cleo lands on the planet they've gone to do terraforming research on, Orbis Alius, and powers up her personal rover "Shakes" for the first time... we find out she's seeded its AI personality with an eclectic mix of rappers and poets, and the thing can't communicate in anything other than rap-style rhyme. It feels so heavy-handed and gimmicky... the reader is supposed to develop (I think) some kind of feelings / sympathy for the Cleo/rover relationship - they're out there on a strange, hostile planet, all alone, years away from Earth and with no way to regularly contact their other crewmates, and they have to depend on each other completely - but every time the rover speaks it's in terrible rhyme that is just frankly annoying and disruptive.

It doesn't help that, because some words don't rhyme well, and there is no meter to Shakes's dialog, the author or editor has "helpfully" italicized all the words that are supposed to rhyme... which made me feel like I was in toddler rap class or something. Like the book had to hold my hand because it thought I wouldn't understand how to read it. There were larger points the author was making here that come together by the end of the book - of course the rhythm and rhyme theme, plus Shakes and Cleo are eventually able to communicate with an alien species that doesn't use spoken language thanks to their understanding of rhythm and rhyme and pentameter. Shakes is also a bit of a mirror for Cleo in that it is made up of a blend of personalities, just like humans like Cleo who come from blended cultures and broken families carry a little bit of everything with them. Cleo spends most of the book coming to grips with this, and that's fine - it's good character development - but the rapping really wasn't necessary. (I thought for the first few chapters with Shakes that it would develop some kind of bug that would eventually revert it to regular speech, or Cleo would get frustrated herself and override it... but no... the rover raps badly through the entire book.)

Aside from the rapping rover, I loved the dark, creepy, confusing, cerebral/trippy world of Orbis Alius and how Cleo's struggles with addiction and inability to connect with other humans impacted her understanding of this new world. Is it scientifically probable? No, not at all, particularly when Cleo finally gets out of her own survival pod and starts exploring - she survives crazy conditions she wouldn't possibly have survived, and the planet itself defies the laws of physics in every new region she enters. But it's still imaginative and fun to read about. We got not just one new intelligent alien species, but many - and the author played with pretty much every dimension we use to identify intelligence and even "life" to create these species, which I found creative and interesting. A lot of sci fi first-contact books just pick one or two dimensions - maybe the alien species communicates with sonar-like pings or light-sequences, or on a different sound frequency, but it's still a carbon-based life form with an easily recognizable communication and neural center. Or perhaps it's not carbon-based, and has different metabolic and physical needs entirely, but it still communicates in a readily recognizable language comprised of tokenized sounds arranged in sequences. In this book, Worrell just mixes it all up, and it was fun reading about each new species Cleo encounters, and watching her trying to figure out how they think, move, and communicate.

The problem, though, is that all of Cleo's discoveries feel too rushed. In fact, she doesn't actually do much solving on her own until close to the end when she figures out how to communicate with a warrior species that only "talks" through movement and dance. For the rest of the discoveries I felt like she went from "vague sense of unease/wrongness" to "none of this makes sense" with few clues to "oh so that's what it is" after seeing the answer in a dream/trip/fugue/memory. The puzzle or first contact parts of this could have really been played up - and to compensate, just get rid of all the auditive trip descriptions (after the first one, I think we get it) and of course the darn rapping rover.

I think Worrell was really on to some cool ideas here... I just wish he'd either spent more time with the alien worldbuilding and discovery, or saved some of his ideas for another book in order to just focus in on a select set.

Part sentimental and part humor - this book does definitely read better in the original French than in the English version (The Heart of Everything, released in the US and UK in late 2025), but it's still not remarkable literature or even really a captivating fun romp. Aside from some light jabs at English, French pronunciation of American English, and American culture that are difficult to translate when the book is in English (and therefore hard to keep in mind that in fact the characters are speaking French), it was hard to pinpoint what it was that didn't translate well. I think it just comes down to the fact that the humor in this book is French, and the book reads a bit like a French screenplay. A faithful (as in, relatively precise) translation thus sounds awkward and stilted, a recitation of lines sort of abruptly juxtaposed. The reader has to imagine camera/perspective cuts during the conversation, plus the French casual/dry humor, and the scenes are both funnier and less awkward. This is more natural in this original version than in the English translation.

Aside from that - I suppose it's a fine book for people who love sentimentality with a bit of absurdist humor thrown in to keep things light. It wasn't really my thing, in either language, but probably a fun romp for someone. Small warning - M. Levy's treatment of women in this novel is definitely from a male, borderline misogynist perspective. All the women are secondary characters here, but none of them are shown making smart, rational decisions, and his male main characters see them very superficially even when claiming to respect them

A tough one to rate - this book really nails its target audience, which is pretty niche. It reads like an actual Bad Batch story arc (more than one episode, but probably less than a full season). But the same qualities that make it a great Bad Batch tale also make it a bit clumsy and immature. The characters are all overdrawn, as they are in the show... which works in an animated show (particularly where 5 different characters are all voiced by the same actor), but feels a little clumsy in print. The writing style overall is certainly nothing special. But you have all the quintessential Bad Batch elements - banter and disagreements and head-butting within Clone Force 99; Omega the sunshiney foil; industrial chase scenes complete with magnetized containers; evil ISB forces; more evil antagonists with shady ties to the Empire. Mad escapes from multiple planets; hijinks; betrayals; dark pasts and heartwarming moments. Props to the author for scratching the itch with a fun, action-packed story that's true to the Bad Batch, even if it's a bit clumsy at times.

Classic Blake Crouch I guess - more thriller than science. Characters were mostly 1-dimensional and underdeveloped, as is typical of Crouch's writing. "Villains" and antagonists are motivated by hubris and megalomania; protagonists are victims of their own brilliance. The book moves fast, particularly in the last third, and I'll give Crouch credit for being able to keep a high-energy plot going. The ending was a dissatisfying "we'll leave this as an exercise to the reader", which in this case feels like a cop-out rather than an artistic/philosophical choice.

This book just wasn't what I was hoping for. It read like a textbook, reciting a lot of disconnected observations, often with few or no cited sources, and failed to really connect most of the events and cultural notes across history. I was hoping for something more like Stamped From the Beginning, and this really wasn't it.

I feel that I didn't learn much new from this book - perhaps it's because I wasn't retaining much due to the way it was presented, or perhaps it's because I already had a good foundation in (closer to) true American history? I find the latter hard to believe (I grew up in the South, after all), so I suspect that it's more that despite the title, this book really isn't as revelatory as it purports to be. (I *did* learn quite a bit from By the Fire We Carry, which just covers partial history for 2 tribes in Oklahoma... so there's more evidence that I do have plenty to learn, but just not from this book.). The book's organization was also difficult to follow. I thought we'd be going chronologically, covering all of what is now the US over the centuries, but it wasn't quite that simple... we skip around quite a bit, covering some time periods more than once as the author doubles back on a period as he moves west across the continent, and sort of glossing over some entirely. It was hard to keep a clear picture of simultaneous events in my head when the Northwestern nations, for example, were discussed many hours of narrative time after the Northeastern nations even during the same years.

My 3* rating is because I do think books like this are important, and I don't doubt the veracity of the history presented. But as a reader, I think it could have been presented better for learning and retention.